President Mark Schlissel and the UM Board of Regents are moving forward with neo-Nazi provocateur Richard Spencer’s request for campus space to host a speaking event. In a communication to the student body that emphasized his opposition to Spencer’s “vile” white supremacy, Schlissel nonetheless justified his decision in terms of a defense of democratic institutions. “As painful as it is to allow this speaker to rent our space,” he lamented, “a democratic society without free speech is unimaginable.”
President’s Schlissel’s defense rests on a conception of democracy that imagines the free individual versus the arbitrary bureaucrat as the core democratic problem, while abdicating from the sustained moral choices and leadership that characterizes political life. But Schlissel and the UM Regents’ notion of democracy isn’t simply their own, but is symptomatic of a broader political and cultural shift in our understanding of democracy, reflected outside UM in debates over corporate power and personhood, gun control, contention over the debt ceiling, and the embrace of a meritocratic multiculturalism (under the banner of diversity) over reparative and redistributive racial justice on campuses, to name a few.
To make sense of our political twilight zone where neo-Nazis can brand themselves as “freedom fighters” for their defense of the first amendment, I want to highlight two major changes in our understanding of democracy over the past 50 years. The first concerns the de-socialization of democratic visions and the second their de-politicization over the last half-century.
Before tracing this recent history, I want to clarify why democracy is best viewed as about organizing social relations (rather than liberating individuals) and requires ongoing moral choices and struggle.
What’s Social and Moral About Democracy?
Democratic visions express a set of moral preferences for the organization of social relations, including:
- The scale and size of a political community and a basis for inclusion—from the self-determining community of the contemporary radical left, to the sovereign nation of the right, and the global network of the progressive liberal
- The distribution of privileges, immunities, protections, and coercive capacities within this community and the basis of this distribution—historically distributed on the basis of citizenship, property, patriarchy, and ethno-racial supremacy
- A set of institutions and rules through which this structure of social governance is enforced and amendments can be made—through, for example, direct participation, voting geography, judicial review, police and military organizations, and deference to codified rules, etc.
Any conception of democratic society implicitly (or explicitly in the case of white nationalists) expresses a moral vision for social organization—enumerating bases for inclusion, distribution, and participation. As social projects, these always require limits of individual autonomy, but because these are moral visions, those who subscribe to this moral worldview do not always recognize limits on individual activity as repressive. Politics, in large part, is the contest over which moral worldviews shape and sustain democratic projects.
Having said a bit about the social and moral character of democratic visions, what do I mean when I suggest that a de-socialized and de-politicized conception of democratic struggle informs President Shlissel’s defense of democracy?
The Recent History of Schlissel’s Democratic Worldview
Over the last fifty years, two trends with expressions among both the left and right of the political spectrum have converged to erode our social and moral understanding of democratic life.
De-socialization refers to a positioning of the free individual versus the government as the core problem of democratic struggle. Because government institutions necessarily structure social relations, this amounts to a rejection of society in the utopian quest for the individual (or small community) free of social limits on individual action.
Among the modern left, progressive and radical, the federal government occupies a central role in explanations of the failures of the 20th century—ranging from the bureaucratic underwriting of housing and wealth segregation and the growth of unfathomably coercive police and carceral state. The late social historian Michael B. Katz characterized the resulting “existential problem” of scholars of urban inequality, as follows:
“Despite their different ontologies, in the 1960s and 1970s progressive and conservative visions of urban crisis shared a common enemy: Bureaucracy… Then the Left lost control of the emerging narrative of failure … which was appropriated by the political Right.”
On the right an ideological attack on “the social,” took the form of the promotion of an individual conception of freedom resting on deference to free-market outcomes. Bureaucracy, or rather state regulation, was always a threat to individual freedom and choice. The effect being a political culture, arguably common among the left and right, that saw the free and choosing individual (or small, autonomous community) in opposition to the coercive government as the central object of democratic struggle. Social visions of democracy and the possibility of freedom under necessary social constraints were jettisoned.
My goal here is not to valorize the social—this too is the site of all forms of domination, but also of sources of fulfillment. Rather, my goal is to clarify the object and stakes of democratic projects being the malleable organization of social relations within a self-defined community, rather than an opposition between the impossible individual and the coercive government.
De-politicization refers to at least two trends in modern politics that locate immutable rules or technocratic interventions, rather than a contest over moral visions of society, as the proper approach to democratic decision-making.
Among the right, it has been the surprising rise and popular spread of “originalist constitutionalism”—the worldview that all contemporary politics and legal choices should conform to the original meaning of the constitution as ratified in 1788. Reaching its full ideological elaboration as the intellectual project of conservative Justice William Rehnquist and his followers, the Tea Party in 2009 signified the spread of originalist constitutionalism into popular discourse and it is now a powerful tool that stops any political debate on gun control and aids in extending free speech rights to corporate individuals and neo-nazis. Debate about the social effects of these decisions are crowded out by appeals to the timeless and universal virtues of constitutionalism and the founding fathers (even progressives catch themselves engaged in originalism in the gun-control debate when they emphasize that the second amendment was really about sustaining local militias).
A second source of de-politicization can be called “technocratic” and is exemplified by the “wonkiness” of modern progressive politics. For a few decades an influential brand of Democratic Party identity has been its reliance on data, facts, experience, or rationality—none problematic on their own, but distortionary when claimed as replacements for, rather than complimentary to, politics. A clear illustration of this trend toward the de-politicization of democratic struggle was the 2016 Democratic Party primary. The experience of one candidate, the most experienced candidate in recent history, was expected in itself and without necessary reference to the substance of experience, to demonstrate legitimacy for office. The visions of social redistribution espoused by the opposing candidate were seldom debated in terms of the appropriateness of the moral vision and diagnosis of social ills but rather on the basis of technical feasibility; an inadequate basis for political debate at the electoral phase given the unpredictability of the legislative phase of politics.
Both this popular constitutionalism and technocratic wonkiness, perhaps paradoxically to readers, are anti-political. They portray the ongoing moral choices and struggles over the organization of society as either sacrilegious to the original design of the nation, or as mob and sentimental irrationality.
Democracy in Michigan
It is in this context of a de-socialized and de-politicized notion of democratic struggle that I propose we interpret President Schlissel’s portrayal of his decision to accept Richard Spencer’s request as a defense of democracy. In his view of the conditions for democracy, one that has reached the status of common sense in the country’s political culture, the unencumbered individual is the fulcrum of democracy, and their opponent is a government (or university President) that “at some point in the future [might decide] that some of your ideas are too dangerous, or too ‘opposed to our values’ to allow others to hear.”
A re-socialized and re-politicized notion of democratic practice would interpret the stakes of Spencer’s provocation differently. Rather than Spencer versus university bureaucrats as the paramount democratic fork, it would be Spencer’s vision of society, bent on the denial of humanity and social inclusion, which would emerge as the most corrosive threat to democracy. Secondly, rather than interpret their decision as the start of a slippery slope of bureaucratic arbitrariness, this instance of moral leadership would be a part of the long-term proactive promotion of a vision of society that would inform responses to hate speech in the future—this is, in fact, the basis of a conception of democratic practice as ongoing moral struggle.
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Luis Flores is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology.
Continue the conversation: The “Crisis Democracy: Conversations on Politics in America” symposium, the final event of LSA’s Bicentennial celebrations, will take place December 6-7, 2017, with four panels bringing together faculty and local organizers to discuss the present and futures of law and political inclusion, free speech, safe space and political expression, and democratic social movements. The symposium will end with a keynote address by Professor Eddie Glaude Jr., titled “Fugitive Democracy Revisited.”
